The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry or The Grey Selkie of Suleskerry is a traditional folk song from Orkney. The song was collected by the American scholar, Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century and is listed as Child ballad number 113. There are many different versions of the song, one of which is a part of the epic ballad, The Lady Odivere.[1]
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A woman laments that she does not know her son's father. A man rises up to tell her that he is the father, and that he is a silkie: a man only on the land, a seal in the water. He takes his son, gives her a purse of gold, and predicts that she will marry a gunner, who will shoot both him and their son.
An earthly nourris sits and sings,
And aye she sings, "Ba lilly wean,
Little ken I, my bairns father,
Far less the land that he staps in."
Then ane arose at her bed fit,
And a grumly guest I'm sure was he,
Saying "Here am I, thy bairns father,
Although I am not comely."
I am a man upon the land,
I am a silkie in the sea,
And when I'm far frae every strand,
My home it is in Sule Skerry."
“It was na weel”, the maiden cried,
“It was na weel, indeed” quo she,
“For the Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie,
To hae come and aught a bairn to me!”
Then he has taken a purse of gold,
And he has laid it on her knee,
Saying, "give to me, my little young son,
And take thee up thy nouriss fee.
It shall come to pass on a summer's day,
When the sun shines hot on every stone,
That I shall take my little young son,
And teach him for to swim the foam.
And thou shalt marry a proud gunner,
And a very proud gunner I'm sure he'll be,
And the very first shot that e're he shoots,
he'll kill both my young son and me."
An interpolated 5th stanza has also been heard:
'Twas weel eno' the night we met,
When I'd be oot and on my way,
Ye held me close, ye held me tight,
"Just ane mair time ere the break o' day!"
The best known tune today is non-traditional, having been written by Jim Waters in 1954. Child was interested only in the texts of the ballads he collected, and Jim explains that the tune was "just the best I could do as a way to get a fine ballad sung". Over the next 2 years, he introduced the ballad to the Boston area at a time when "hootnannies" filled the Great Court of MIT on a weekly basis (before recorded folk songs were widely available). Jim Butler added the song to his repertoire, according to his notes, in October 1954, on a page labelled "MITOC Supp.", being the MIT Outing Club addition to his typewritten Child Ballads. Butler taught the song to several people, including Bonnie Dobson. This is the tune that Joan Baez popularized as "Silkie" in the early 1960s.
Although Jean Redpath disparaged Water's tune as "phony", preferring a longer version of Child 113 to another tune, by 1965, Jim Butler had heard Water's tune sung by a Scottish student at the University of British Columbia, unaccompanied in the traditional style, and under the impression that he had learned it from his grandfather. "This has to be one of the most flattering things that has ever happened to me", added Waters, who eventually copyrighted his version and assigned it to Folk Legacy Records.
The original tune was preserved by Dr. Otto Andersson who heard it sung by John Sinclair on the island of Flotta, Orkney. Dr Andersson said, “I had no idea at the time that I was the first person to write down the tune. The pure pentatonic form of it and the beautiful melodic line showed me that it was a very ancient melody that I had set on paper.”[2]
American folksinger Pete Seeger set the poem "I Come and Stand at Every Door" by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet to the tune of "The Great Silkie". The American rock band The Byrds sang it on their third album, Fifth dimension (1966). The song was later covered by This Mortal Coil. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds later recorded the song with its original lyrics as part of his Folk Den project.